Kurt C. Hall
Analyst · James Dix with Wedbush
Well, I think it's a little bit of all of the above. Although I would tell you that the rebroadcast of programming that's showing on -- up on TV already is somewhat cannibalistic. It's not clear to me that, that's adding -- it's adding inventory obviously, but it's not clear to me whether the -- where the dollars are actually falling. And in fact, we know that some online programming is being used to make good TV under delivery. So it's very hard in the TV programming world, whether it's Hulu or any of the other platforms you mentioned, where that money is really falling and how it's being captured. Clearly, the full episode players, pre-roll, these kinds of things that we're seeing out there are obviously adding a lot of impressions to the marketplace and are attracting a lot of dollars. The one thing that's not clear to me, because look, TV grew this year, we grew this year, and so it's not clear to me that there's necessarily a bypass going on, where digital is all of a sudden taking money away from the high-quality video platforms like ourselves and TV. What could be going on is there's a lot of other expenditures, what are known as below-the-line expenditures, non-media expenditures like couponing and all sorts of other in-store promotions and all other things that we don't think of as traditional media, that we think is shifting to digital, much the way newspapers shifted primarily to Google. And so you're seeing, I think, a lot of that shifting going on, which really doesn't have a direct impact on us. I think what you're seeing in our guidance is that we're trying a lot of new things this year. We obviously know there's going to be a CPM decrease. And the $64 question for us is can we maintain our pricing rigor, if you will, at the top or upper ends of the TV pricing scale and still generate utilizations that we need to generate to offset the CPM declines? And if you look at our internal budgets, that's really what -- how we've looked at the national business, is that you're going to have a CPM decline and a utilization increase and they generally offset each other and hopefully, they more than offset each other. That was the experience we saw in '13. And especially in the fourth quarter, because a 30-percentage point increase in utilization is pretty dramatic. And clearly, some of that was driven by pricing, some of that was driven by some late demand in the fourth quarter. So I think it's -- there's just a little bit of cautiousness, if you will, with us in some of the things that are going on out there.